HEARTFELT and WHOLEHEARTED

This is a story of a Creating Circle...a love story...a story of healing long and slow. I am going to tell it backwards because I can only see it looking back and I am supremely grateful that I have learned to see it at all. This little felted lady is all heart. I spent an afternoon with my friend April playing with felting. It was Valentines Day actually and I started out poking hearts shaped with cookie cutters. I made a bunch...6 anyway. As we jabbed and poked, and talked and laughed, I noticed April was forming a head just as I noted that the pink heart looked like feet. Soooo...I started making a head and suddenly I knew what the 6 hearts were for. I do love the spirit of creativity. You always have to take a leap of faith even to begin to make something because sometimes you just don't know in your head what your heart wants to do. Writing is like that too. Sometimes you just have to start without knowing where your headed and all the steps you take finally begin to point the way...and you say AHA! so that's where I am going. So her little body is a heart with another heart at her center. Her hat is a smaller heart and if you turn her around, she has a heart backpack she is wearing that says LOVE. Her wings are half hearts. Her hair is white and she has a rat tail in the back because she is a cool old bird. She came together in the spirit of creativity, of sharing and hanging out with a good friend who also finds sustenance from making stuff and delights in the discovery as things unfold. I love my friend April. I have known her since we were young parents in Marblehead, though I knew of her from early high school years. Her friendship has helped me navigate some very stormy seas...painting pottery at her shop called Hands On...making ornaments for the UU church fair...working at Me and Thee...taking part in Goddess education and when I hit the bottom in Marblehead, April had appreciation for parts of me that no one else seemed to notice. It was a great pink morning when she and Ken moved to Maine and once again, we became neighbors. In February 2003, just before they moved up, Stephen and I were invited for a dinner with April and Ken at Gary and Les's house. It was once again, Valentines Time...the day after I believe. Stephen couldn't come to dinner because he had contracted the flu at Sunday River and he was too sick to go...but I went anyway. Stephen and I were having some relationship difficulties that seemed a product of moving away from the familiar old and welcoming the new and unfamiliar...a necessary process to moving from one state to another.

Two days later, I came down with the flu. I had a high fever. I found myself beside myself...nearly hallucinating...feeling like I wanted to jump out of my skin and bite the wall. Had I been a dog, I may have had rabies. I was ferocious and frothing at the mouth. Stephen took me to the health center and I was given something that was supposed to reverse the growth of the virus. I'm not sure it was a good thing. The upshot of the whole thing was, the virus caused me to have Congestive Heart Failure. I was weak, fearful, unable to participate in anything fully. By April, I noticed that I could barely carry my skis from the car to the lift at Barker. The little mound from the porch to the lift was like a mountain to me. I began my regular trips to the doctor. That spring was a wet one and over time it became more and more difficult to breathe. I was treated for asthma. I moved very slowly through the spring and summer. My sister heidi came to visit and she expressed real concern about my health as I had to sleep in a chair by that point. I was a crappy wife at that point and a worse friend. I had no energy for anyone or anything, though I did manage to plant my garden. It was harvesting my first potatoes that told me something serious was going on. DUH!!! I couldn't even carry 2 lbs of potatoes up the ramp to the house without stopping a bunch of times to catch my breath.

Stephen and I were celebrating our 20th anniversary in 2003. It was August 20th. We made our way to Monhegan Island after a stop at the doctor. I wanted something so I could breathe...thought a boat ride in the fresh air and some recreation time with Stephen was all I really needed. I was given an inhaler and some kind of sodium based medicine that I can't remember now. Driving to the coast, we passed a farm. I was mildly alarmed by the fact that as we passed, I experienced a cow that appeared to turn into a pig. In my usual dismissive way, we laughed and ignored it and continued on our journey.It was a gorgeous hot weekend and I was looking forward to the fairy houses and the art and spending the night in an inn. So...that meant walking. Monhegan isn't flat but you can't call it really hilly either. As we walked I became increasingly distressed, finally with Stephen taking my hand and waiting patiently every few steps for breath, we passed an ambulance with grass growing through it and plants curled all around it. I became frightened because it suddenly dawned on me that if something of a health crisis were to happen,
we were miles out to sea and far from any emergency assistance. I couldn't sleep all night and when we got up in the AM, I was swollen with elephant legs. How did I wait so long? How did I dismiss the signs? How did I not care enough about myself to get help? When we finally went home, I saw the doctor again. This time...4 months after the first symptoms, they took an x-ray and discovered my heart had hugely enlarged and my lungs were full of fluid. By the time I was seen by a cardiologist, my heart was functioning at 19%. But the scariest thing was, I was imagining how great it would be to stop breathing altogether. It was so hard to breathe that I wanted to die. I not only had heart failure... I was depressed, unable to sleep, feeling unloved and unloving and that no only was my heart failing...but my whole life was a failure. I no longer feared death. I welcomed it. Perhaps one of me did die.

Today...nine years later...I seem to be healed. It has been a very long journey, learning to see how the mind and spirit interact with the body both positively and negatively. Mental habits are the most insidious and difficult for me to get a grip on. I am my own worst enemy and I see that in the self talk that I indulge in when I am tired, depressed or frustrated. I was on a ton of medications, including antidepressants until just last fall. Today, I still have to take a few heart meds and will have to take them for the rest of my life.That wasn't an easy pill to swallow for a nature girl who wants everything natural and pure. But today...Ah yes TODAY...in this very moment...at this present time...I just finished 30 minutes on my treadmill and I jogged the whole time...and I didnt get tired. I felt heart power surge. I felt whole...I felt wholehearted and connected to my homemade St. Johnswort/ Dandilion/Hawthorne tincture that helps my heart have wings and I feel the love in my heart being liberated...slowly at first...toward the folks that have been caring to me. I feel grateful for the wonders of friends in my life and the healing power of nature and I try now to imagine...what can my life hold when I set that heart power free ?

The moral of the story is...care for the heart first...then give it a head...but don't forget the wings. This ole bird has dreams of flight. Perhaps today is lift off.

EVOLVING FELT

I received a gift from a friend for Christmas. It was a Felting Kit to make the chickadee coaster at the bottom of the photo. Amazingly, I'd never heard of felting before or if I had, I never paid any attention to it. But the soil had been worked so to speak. Two years ago, we bought a lamb from a friend who raised them and Stephen was invited to his house one November morning to shoot the purchase. When he returned with the dead lamb in the back of the truck, I sunk my hands into the wool and sobbed my heart out for it's loss of life. I felt the lanolin on my hands and the soothing gratitude in my heart that somehow made it possible for me to come to terms with the death caused by my choice to eat meat. I love lamb. We don't eat much red meat but we both love the flavor of lamb...and the way it smells when it's cooking reminds me of my mother making Sunday dinner for the family when I was a kid. It was the only meal during the week that we shared with our parents. After I had my private mourning for the lamb and my gratitude had been expressed, I cut some of the raw wool thinking that one day, I might make something to honor the life of that spring lamb. Then I sent most of it to a friend who makes fiber arts. That was that. Then I got this kit. It was a small block of foam, two needles, a selection of colored wool needed to render the image and a 5x5 piece of wool felt...a canvas for the image. There were also directions and a picture of a chickadee to transfer. I carefully avoided it for a few weeks. It seems to be a deep pattern for me. Whenever I buy new art supplies or something new that is just for me, it takes a while for me to warm up to it. I might have avoided it all winter if April hadn't invited me over to play with the felting with her. I discovered I loved the process. You can do it beside a fire or while chatting or watching stupid shows on TV. I love the tender softness of the wool...the bright natural dyes that color it, the rhythmic poking, pricking, and smacking of the fibers. I love how forgiving it is...how easy to correct errors and how easy it is to pick up after. I love the fact that it is a process that works with the natural properties of wool fiber and encourages the warm wool to become fabric even in its raw form. I quickly realized that I wanted to do more birds and a field trip to A Wrinkle In Thyme Farm opened up a whole new vista. First and foremost, I wanted to do a larger piece inspired by a photo of the view out my kitchen window. Purchases needed to be made...a multiple needle felting tool...a larger piece of wool felt backing...lots of colors. I spent quite a bit of money rapidly and realized I would not be able to buy kits of birds because the price was inhibitive. My next hurdle was to decide I could render the birds on wool myself...not easy for a person who really doesn't draw well. So it took one more field trip with April to find more colored roving and some real wool yardage to create my own bird squares. Meanwhile...I tentatively worked on my larger landscape while I sat with my Mom in Salem. The landscape was pretty exciting because I really got a sense of painting with the wool. It fed my confidence just enough to get up my mojo for making some birds. That is how I became hooked on felting.

After I purchased a black woolen blanket and centered the landscape on it...I could see it more as an art piece. The January Landscape of a pink sunset and the flowing pink river was a perfect meditation for healing prayers for my sister's breast surgery. The cold winter image and the stark trees amoung snow in the meadows made me feel all that was frozen inside as well as outside. Fears...stoic crustiness...frozen water and the absense of wildlife all seemed bleak. But the light...so pink above and below...thats where the prayer was. And funnily enough, a pink dawn greeted me after I took her to the hospital for her morning mastectomy. Pink is good. It's a happy color...soft and girlish.  A gift of prayer for her healing. As we awaited and I sat with my mother for hours, I felted birds. They seemed to be a reminder and a promise of return...the return of spring...the return of birds and their songs in the trees...the return of my sisters good health. And while I felted birds...my mother and I chatted about her mother's love of cardinals...the Cedar Waxwing that signaled my Grandmother's immenent death...lots of experiences where birds crystallized memories. She would become quiet and doze listening to the gentle pounding of me needling the felt. There was alot of love in the air and I managed to bring it on down to earth by working those birds. And as I worked, each hour was marked by the calls on my mother's bird clock. I wonder...what time is bluebird time? What hour is the cardinal song? Is the Goldfinch ready for tea? And then it seemed quite obvious what I should do with the birds. I thought...I'll make 12 of them and put them in a circle around the Winter Sunset and when I am finished...I will have my mother's promise of return hammered into a blanket that will keep me warm while I sink into my reveries. I like it. I like the whole thing...My Mom...Mother Nature...the deep freeze...the pink light and the returning songbirds. And I especially love my first friend, the chickadee...persistent...undaunted...and even in the dead of winter...cheerful. I will also have something that will forever remind me of my sweet alone time with my Mom as she rested her old bones by the fire.

IS IT TIME ???

Hello 2/12/12. Today here in Bethel is a frigid one...a real breath of ole man winter. The wind makes my nose run and when I breathe in deep, I can feel a cold burn in my lungs and even Sadie is ready to come inside after chasing her tennis balls for a bit. The snow is crunchy and everywhere we walk regularly has become slick with ice. This is a strange winter, and strange is unusual, unfamiliar, unpredictable...surprising. A week ago, there were 35 robins in my crab apple taking turns on the fruitfest with a large flock of Cedar Waxwings. Shocking on a groundhog day in early February. My trips to Mass. create an unusal pattern to my life and as I journey north to south...then south to north twice a month, I feel a little like The Little Engine That Could...and as I repeat my mantra of "I think I can...I think I can...I think I can" when I feel like I'm running out of steam, I find there is real power in self talk. Expressing fear of not being able to handle it seems to affirm my inability to handle it...where the more positive tune on my dial, leaves me feeling surprised at how much I can accomplish. So I keep putting along as winter confounds and I am blessed with extraordinary signs of early spring to reassure and promise the icy slippery slope that I'm on will eventually become solid ground under my feet again. Massachusetts has already tapped for Maple syrup and these big fat buds are already set to bursting while here the windows are still decorated in frost patterns and the air is biting. I feel like I'm journeying between two worlds as I make my way between seasons. The ravens and fox, owls and coyote are all restless with the deep stirrings of spring. As the north wind bites my nose today...I am filled with a breath of warm southern air during a thermal inversion on the chairlift and there is the promise. I imagine my Mom is journeying between worlds as well...though I expect her journey shuttles her between here and the great beyond. She is building a bridge just as I am...a bridge between two worlds.

This visit was a bit different because my sister was scheduled for her mastectomy on monday and the atmosphere of the house was a generalized concern for her procedure and affirmations for the outcome. Mom was aware of the issues but she frequently visits other times. She woke up Tuesday morning saying she had to go see Bethy at the hospital. She knew she might be needed by one of her daughters but in her early morning post dream state, she was visiting my sister Beth who passed away in 1985. The brain is a remarkable thing and one is left wondering about the validity of parallell universes. Perhaps the doorway to those realms is in our own brains.

Any way...we are 2 women travelling between 2 worlds in our own unique way...even as we make the journey from winter to spring. There is no real "RIGHT" time for spring to start. We humans are so enamored of our timepieces...our clocks...our 24 hours, our time zones...all created by the brain of the human. Real time is told by processes. Real time is the department of Mother Nature. She is the authority on timing and she doesn't really give a hoot if we are syncronized with her rhythms or not. But I can assure you...the less one structures ones life around human made time and embraces the rhythms of the changing Earth, the more harmoniously one can fulfill ones plans. Spring is supposed to start on March 21. The Celts celebrated the deep stirrings of spring on February 2 with their holiday known as Imbolc. They seemed to understand that even though the cold and snow met the eye...there were mating ravens and owls, arriving flocks of birds and life starting to move deep beneath the surfaces of things...all perceivable by the heart. I'm feeling the quickening of approaching birth. This year I am more in tune with my wild mother. We had a really early spring arrive in 2009 and Stephen and I were so conditioned by our experience with past time that when the sap started to run in mid-february, we ignored it and stayed in denial because we don't tap before the first weekend in March. Holding on to human time...we missed the first half of the maple sap run altogether. Thanks to taking care of my personal Mom, I am more tuned in to my wild Mom and I am listening to the secret signs of the birds and animals. Spring is coming. And if we want to catch the sweetness of life and harvest the gifts of the trees, we are better off hearing from the birds...what time is it? Time for the Robins to start singing in the spring.

BREATH OF SPRING

Age is really just a statistic. Isn't it? There's a person inside of me that seems untouched by the passing years. She keeps life interesting because she doesn't act her age. She doesn't really even seem to be aware of her age. Nor does she really care about anybody elses'. She just keeps on keeping on yet she constantly surprises me. Today was race day. I remember as a 12 year old skiing at Wildcat and Black Mountain in Jackson NH that I was most impressed by the "Silver Streaks". That's what they called the skiers over fifty and I remember thinking to myself...Wow. I hope I can still ski when I'm that old. When we moved to Maine in 2000, I was a terminal intermediate skier because I really never had too much of a chance to practice my skills. We...as children...came north with my Dad to ski maybe once a year. I was told by a ski teacher at Whitney's Hill that I might become a ski racer because I seemed to so enjoy the speed. I was rubbery and much closer to the ground...bouncy and springy and flexible.As parents of young children, we struggled financially and managed to make one trip a year to the mountains...enough to pass on our love of winter sports to our kids but still not enough time to break through the intermediate barrier. I would be pretty confident after the third day but we never stayed longer than 4, so the next year, I'd start from scratch again building up my confidence. Stephen lived in Vermont for some years and he really became proficient as a skier...but until he learned how to coach a student in skiing, he was pretty pathetic as a teacher. He believed in me. He figured I could do terrain that I felt intimidated by and sometimes it seemed that skiing with him set me further backwards. But things have changed because of living up here. He actually talked me into participating in the locals challenge race and so at the tender age of 57...I dropped into my first course and skied my first gates. When I crossed the finish line whole...I cried like a baby....such was the cache of fear that I had built up in my mind and the relief I felt once I completed the run. I felt like a 10 year old. And actually...as I recall...I fell that run even though I finished. Today I felt similar. Now I'm 59 and I've been participating for 2 years and now am working on my third.

As I weave between caring for my Mom and trying to be strong and supportive of my baby sister as she sets out to beat Cancer...I feel tender...uncertain...never clear if I will become tearful at some odd little thing...a song in the supermarket...a look between a mother and child...I have very strong feelings...anger, sadness, delight in my blessings. Sometimes when I come home I am irritable and crabby and I just want to hide. I can't do anything to change things for my family...but I can be there and I can help get through the days that challenge. But I often feel like an infant. Can't find words to communicate...sometimes I can only cry...kick my legs and pound the ground. Anguish is exhausting and it leaves me little in the way of energy for the more superficial issues that surround me. I find I am open and vulnerable...somedays, feeling like an almost 60 year old...somedays feeling like a 12 year old.
Strength ebbs and flows. I'm never sure if I can actually pull off what I've set up for myself based on my self-knowledge of the past. I went to my first day of volunteering at MHS...Maine Handicapped Skiing and rather than help a disabled person to feel the joy and freedom of skiing, I began to weep. I met my own sad self and was totally unable to rise to the occaision even though rationally speaking...a time of unemployment is a wonderful time to volunteer and stay connected. I realized I couldn't take the pressure right now...that my needy little self needed to free ski as therapy. Everyone is super...very supportive...understanding...forgiving. And there I am...feeling inept...can't rise to the occaision...that old critic slips in for a field day. Confidence is hard won. And it builds slowly. Set backs are tough. They demand that a person develope a new tactic within ...supportive...understanding...forgiving. Can't I BE THAT PERSON? Well yes I can...as long as I'm willing to see the rude, mean and critical way that I talk to myself.

So we had a few inches of snow yesterday and we slept great on our new king sized bed. The morning dawned soft and everything was highlighted in white. As I rode the chairlift to the top of Barker to take my first race run, there was a thermal inversion. It was cold and sleeting some at South Ridge but higher up on the hill, the temperature went up a lot. We rade through the fog and as we came out of it, I inhaled deeply and my lungs were filled with a warm southern air...a real smell of spring. I felt like a little kid. Conditions were great but the light was flat and my goggles kept glazing over. I was nervous about the race. I try not to think too much because that seems to screw me up. If I think too much I talk myself out of things better than I talk myself into them. So...no talk. Just do it. And I did. I took a dive about half way down the course. But I told myself...get up and finish. So I did. No dramatic tears at the end. No awkward self-conciousness. I made it. I finished. I'm whole. And because I got up and finished...I didn't go again. Didn't need to. I probably came in DFL...but the whole point of this lesson is to show up and do your best for the team. Noone is judging me. Dare I drop the judgement of myself? That really makes me feel young...just like a child of the universe who deserves to be here. I'm so much younger when I lead with my heart... and that old almost 60 year old lady that thinks too much...talks too much and judges too much...well she's really doing just fine...especially when she forgets too much.